1. Field
Aspects of the present disclosure relate generally to wireless communication systems, and more particularly to utilizing resources for retransmission feedback.
2. Background
Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various communication services such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, etc. These wireless networks may be multiple-access networks capable of supporting multiple users by sharing the available network resources. Examples of such multiple-access networks include Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) networks, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) networks, Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) networks, Orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA) networks, and Single-Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) networks.
A wireless communication network may include a number of base stations that can support communication for a number of user equipments (UEs). A UE may communicate with a base station, such as an enhanced NodeB (eNB) via the downlink and uplink. The downlink (or forward link) refers to the communication link from the base station to the UE, and the uplink (or reverse link) refers to the communication link from the UE to the base station. Further, communications between mobile devices and base stations may be established via single-input single-output (SISO) systems, multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, and so forth. In addition, mobile devices can communicate with other mobile devices (and/or base stations with other base stations) in peer-to-peer wireless network configurations.
Moreover, wireless networks can support carrier aggregation (CA), additional carrier types, coordinated multiple point (CoMP), and similar evolved communication technologies. For example, carrier aggregation can relate to assigning multiple carriers to a device to receive communications from one or more base stations. One of the multiple carriers, for example, can be an anchor carrier over which the device can communicate control data while receiving user plane data over substantially all carriers. This can improve communication throughput at the device. In CoMP, multiple base stations can communicate coordinated data with the device over distinct resources established with the multiple base stations. Thus, throughput is increased at the device in this case as well since the device can simultaneously receive from the multiple base stations. With such evolvement of communication technologies, some concepts may become insufficient to support the communication technologies, such as current control channel definitions (e.g., physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) in LTE). In LTE, for example, a control channel is defined in the first n symbols of a subframe, where n is between one and three. Such resources may not be sufficient for a number of served devices using evolved communication technologies.